He Left a Legacy in Lowell Like No Other. Just Look Around

By David Perry, The Sun, Lowell, Mass.

Jan. 18–Paul Tsongas dialed the number he knew by heart. Jim Cook, executive director of the Lowell Plan, answered. How much money was in the treasury for Kittredge Park? Tsongas asked. Are there volunteers in place to plant bulbs in the spring?

It was the day of the 1992 Maryland Democratic primary. Tsongas was running for U.S. president.

“And he doesn’t have other things to worry about?” Cook wondered that day.

Tsongas was never far from Lowell.

He died 10 years ago today of pneumonia, leaving a hole in the forcefield of local politics, a wife, three daughters and a city whose resurgence wears his signature. He was 55.

Tsongas helped form the nation’s first urban national historical park, in downtown. When the monolithic Wang Tower was empty, he brought Nynex back to the table, which provided an anchor for the now-thriving Cross Point.

He helped bring professional baseball and hockey here, had the vision for LeLacheur Park and the arena that bears his name. He brought the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Middlesex Community College to the fore of local civics.

At Lowell High School, where he graduated in 1958, a young Tsongas operated one of the school’s elevators. Over time, he would steer his city upward from grim economic times.

He was elected to Lowell’s City Council twice, as county commissioner and to Congress. He won Edward Brooke’s seat in the U.S. Senate.

In Washington, D.C., at night, he talked about Lowell’s issues, not the Senate’s.

Nicola “Niki” Sauvage, the daughter of an Air Force colonel stationed at the Pentagon, was fresh from her junior year at Smith College.

Paul Tsongas was freshly minted from Yale Law. He had been through Dartmouth. Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s call to public service, he served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. He was interning for Lowell’s congressman, F. Bradford Morse, as was one of Niki’s roommates.

They met at a party in June 1967 in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, maybe “the only party he willingly went to in his life,” Niki Tsongas says.

He wore a plaid shirt. They talked briefly.

“Paul was not a party person,” she says, sitting in her fifth-floor office at Middlesex Community College, overlooking what is now the F. Bradford Morse Federal Building.

They dated. He went to the Caribbean to train Peace Corps volunteers. She campaigned in New Hampshire with presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy. He supported Robert F. Kennedy, but envied her grass-roots work.

Tsongas returned to Lowell shortly before Kennedy was slain in June 1968.

In 1969, he was hired as a deputy assistant attorney general under Attorney General Robert Quinn.

Richard Howe, then a city councilor, sensed that Tsongas had affection for and dedication to his hometown, beset with high unemployment and abandoned buildings.

Kendall Wallace, then city editor at The Sun, sized up the new guy over coffee: No local base. Not a big neighborhood guy, nor active in the community.

“I told him he didn’t have a prayer of a chance,” Wallace says.

But Tsongas slapped a map on a wall of his modest apartment at Highland and Thorndike streets, poking pins in the territory he covered, moving relentlessly door to door each night.

He won a seat on the nine-member council, placing fifth. Paul and Niki married a month later.

Tsongas refused to campaign for Quinn in 1971. Quinn fired him. Howe, an attorney, let Tsongas use a spare office to establish a law practice.

Tsongas placed sixth in the 1971 council race.

“He proved you don’t have to be the most popular guy in town to do what needs to be done,” Wallace says. “He made tough decisions and did what he thought was right.”

Wallace isn’t sure Tsongas could win a third council term. It didn’t matter. Tsongas had his eye on Congress.

Tsongas asked Dennis Kanin, a legislative consultant for a Colorado congressman, to run his campaign. Kanin had met Tsongas and was impressed.

But friends in Washington told Kanin “it was an absolutely hopeless cause.” Kanin accepted anyway.

He moved into Niki and Paul’s frigid home. They couldn’t afford heat.

The campaign ran “on faith more than anything,” Kanin says. Among the volunteers was a college freshman named Marty Meehan, who dropped pamphlets.

The staff crafted a clever TV ad: “How do you pronounce Tsongas?”

Outspent by Republican incumbent Paul Cronin, Tsongas captured 61 percent of the vote and became the first Democrat to serve the Fifth District in 90 years. Kanin headed every Tsongas campaign from then on.

Tsongas’ father came from Greece at age 3. Tsongas’ mother, Katina, contracted tuberculosis and spent the last six years of her life in a sanitarium in Vermont. Contagious, she could only watch from a window as Paul and his twin sister, Thaleia, played on the grounds.

He later said he had no memories of her.

A Harvard graduate, Efthemios Tsongas worked 12-hour days, six days a week, running Tsongas Dry Cleaners at 788 Gorham St. Paul worked after school, twisting wire into coat hangers, and eventually drove the delivery truck. The city’s slide claimed the family business.

“Paul felt part of his struggle was overcoming the environment of the city,” his widow says. “It was captive of the larger economy. He would carry that into the Senate in time.”

He delivered millions to Lowell in state and federal aid.

He was proud to co-author the Alaska Land Act of 1980, which protected millions of acres of wilderness, but he never made it to Alaska.

“Here,” Niki says, “he could see the tangible results of the work he’d done.”

Meehan has held Tsongas’ former Fifth District seat for 14 years.

“The whole Lowell way of doing things was something Paul created,” he says. “And he set a high standard in Congress. He had a propensity for being two or three steps ahead of what was unfolding, nationally or internationally. His ethics were always very high.”

In 1983, Tsongas was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes. He decided not to run for re-election as a U.S. senator, and headed home to Lowell to be with Niki and their daughters, Ashley, Katina and Molly.

“On their deathbed, no one ever says, ‘I wish I had spent more time with my business,’ ” he wrote in his 1984 book, Heading Home.

He underwent experimental bone-marrow treatment, and joined the Boston law firm Foley, Hoag & Eliot. He embraced the lessons of cancer, Kanin says.

“He felt it made him see life differently and understand what was really important. It helped him identify what made him happy and what he valued. It was, first, his family. Second, Lowell.

“And then everything else.”

Like a Kittredge Park tulip bulb, Tsongas’ political life bloomed again.

He stood on the stage of Boarding House Park on April 30, 1991, introduced by Howe, declaring his run for president. Another longshot Greek Democrat from Massachusetts, pundits scoffed.

One Lowellian had run for president before. Benjamin Butler, the Civil War general, governor, congressman and reputed silverware thief, ran unsuccessfully as a Greenback Party candidate in 1884.

Well into an era of TV-centric presidential campaigns, Tsongas was an untelegenic throwback with a sophisticated message. His voice was part Elmer Fudd, part Jinx the Cat, ripe for an Al Franken sendup on Saturday Night Live. With a slump in his shoulders, Tsongas sold hard truth door-to-door.

His message, outlined in the 86-page A Call to Economic Arms, was socially liberal but pro-business. He challenged Democrats to slay the deficit, embrace alternative energy, protect the environment, ditch special interests. To embrace “a higher vision.”

“I’m not Santa Claus,” he told voters during the campaign.

Tsongas won the New Hampshire primary and a half-dozen other state primaries, but camera-friendly Bill Clinton steamrolled through Super Tuesday. Tsongas ended his campaign nine days later.

It was the only race Tsongas ever lost. But Kanin says Clinton was forced to deal with Tsongas’ “higher vision” for eight years.

“Paul helped raise people’s sightlines and gave them the courage and the faith they didn’t know they had,” Kanin says. “And part of his legacy is the Lowell that exists today, which sprung from that very belief that he gave others, the courage and faith.”

Cook worked in the city’s planning and development office. He met regularly with Sen. Tsongas and then-City Manager Joseph Tully, to plot projects and grants. Cook was always impressed “that he knew so much about the day-to-day issues in the city.”

Tsongas and Tully formed The Lowell Plan in 1990, and Tsongas asked Cook to become director.

Tsongas, Cook says, “opened doors no one else could.”

In 1995, Tsongas arranged a meeting with Red Sox owner John Harrington and General Manager Dan Duquette. No one else calling would have gotten through, Cook says.

In courting an American Hockey League team to Lowell, Tsongas recruited Bruins legend Bobby Orr to attend a meeting with AHL directors. The entire board surrounded him for autographs.

“I knew we were in,” Cook says.

In 1992, Tsongas and former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman formed the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan lobbying effort to reduce the federal deficit.

Later that year, a cancerous lump was found in his abdomen. He wrote a third book, Journey of Purpose, in 1995, the same year, he and others announced the city had landed the AHL team. He served as governor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1996, around the same time as he underwent a second bone-marrow transplant.

On June 24, 1996, he was honored at the Lowell Spinners’ inaugural opener at Alumni Field, home until LeLacheur Park was finished.

It was finally time to relax. Niki had left her law practice. They spent summers at their home on Cape Cod. The girls could line up summer jobs there.

“We had a little boat. We could just enjoy things for the first time,” she says. “I am so grateful for that time.”

Meehan visited Tsongas at the hospital two weeks before he died. LeLacheur Park had road and money issues. Tsongas made Meehan promise to “get it done.”

Cook visited a week later. They watched the Patriots win a playoff game. The team would eventually march to the Super Bowl that Tsongas wouldn’t see.

Tsongas assessed the value of a Pats Super Bowl bid, “how it would pick everybody up.”

Even on his deathbed, his thoughts were beyond himself.

Niki has moved to Charlestown. Ashley, 32, works as a policy adviser for Oxfam America. Katina, 29, is a regional field coordinator for the Environmental Defense Fund. Molly, 25, works in the Philadelphia office of Smart Power, a clean-energy concern.

Niki recalls a fall day. Paul had been at Kittredge Park with volunteers and planted about 1,000 tulip bulbs.

“Do you plant them up or down?” he asked.

“They go up. Why?”

It was cold, near dusk, when Paul Tsongas trudged back to the park.

Dig. Flip. Re-cover. Dig, flip, re-cover.

Cook laments that Tsongas never got to see the ballpark or arena.

The Spinners have sold out a record 270 consecutive home games. There is hockey and music at the arena.

And every spring, Kittredge Park blooms anew.

David Perry’s e-mail address is dperry@lowellsun.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Sun, Lowell, Mass.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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